Chapter 11
Ethan’s brows lifted slightly. “I think you’ve misunderstood. I said I’ve been patient with you. I didn’t say I’m a patient man.”
“Do you understand? Cupcake.”
From someone else, in some other room, cupcake might have landed as a compliment. Out of his mouth it went straight down her back.
She breathed in and gave up another step. “Neither of those. And not just those — you’re not touching me anywhere.”
She’d let him pull her off course. Now that her head was clearing: what if the biting was about transmitting something—
The refusal put a line between his brows. Whatever patience there had been was spent.
He picked his phone up off the table, woke it, and held it out to her.
Lily didn’t understand, and looked at the screen warily.
It showed the street outside the restaurant.
From the angle, a public camera mounted along the riverbank.
She knew that camera.
The city had put it in. Jenny had mentioned it — it pointed at their door, and the drunks outside had gotten noticeably less brave since.
And a live municipal feed was sitting in this man’s hand.
Which meant he had somebody inside the city government. Or — more likely — that he was simply one of the people to whom such things belong, and the question of access had never come up for him at all.
What kind of man is this.
Sweat came out at her temples and along her back.
He pushed the phone closer, indicating she should take it.
She took it and looked properly.
The screen showed the smoking area along the side of the restaurant where the staff went.
It was slow this time of day, and several of them were out there.
Kevin was one of them.
Ethan’s fingertip rested lightly on Kevin’s figure on the screen. His tone stayed conversational. “At his height, the point of impact lands three inches below the ribs. The liver and spleen rupture first. Intra-abdominal pressure peaks within about three tenths of a second.”
He lifted those green eyes to her, and something was moving in the back of them.
“You’d watch your coworker’s intestines come out through the opening and catch on the edge of the abutment, and drain down it with the blood.”
He was tilting his head slightly while he said it, studying her reaction, his mouth doing something faint — a man sharing a piece of interesting information.
The calm underneath it was worse than a threat would have been.
Lily’s stomach turned over. Her knuckles went white around the phone.
Ethan’s eyes stayed on her. “Now. Beside where those people are standing, there’s a car parked. What do you suppose happens if that car loses control?”
It came out of her before she could stop it. “Are you insane? You’d put that many lives on the table so you can bite me?”
He shrugged, unbothered. “You keep refusing. You’ve left me with this.”
He said it the way a man describes an inconvenience someone else has caused him.
Then he took the phone back, closed the feed, and brought up a number.
His thumb hovered over the call.
“While you still have a choice, make it. Mouth, or chest.” No inflection at all.
“If you refuse again, that group won’t be as lucky as they were earlier. One or two of them, at least.”
There was exactly one thought in Lily’s head, and it arrived whole.
Kill him.
If she moved fast enough she could have the gun out from under her clothes and the muzzle against his temple before he finished the sentence.
And then what. Then she was a woman with no papers standing over a dead man in his own house, in a country that had no record of her existing. She wasn’t getting out of that either.
Her fingers tightened slowly at her side.
She breathed in, and got the word out through her teeth. “…Mouth.”
Ethan smiled and tilted his head at her. “The struggling is entertaining. But I prefer you like this.”
He stood and started for the stairs.
“Come with me.”
Lily didn’t move. “Where?”
He stopped and looked back at her over his shoulder. “I need to confirm you’re clean first.”
The breath caught in her chest.
By what logic.
The person about to be bitten hadn’t even asked whether he was carrying anything, and he was busy having doubts about her.
How many more ways is there to humiliate me.
“I’m not going. Bite me now, or let me leave.”
His brows drew together slightly. “I thought you understood your position. You have no choice here. Why waste time on resistance that accomplishes nothing?”
“I should remind you.” His voice dropped. “I don’t have much patience left. If you’d like to keep fighting, I have no objection to making your situation clearer to you.”
Lily thought about the feeds on his phone and let out a long breath.
She’d just watched what this man was.
He wasn’t bluffing. Half a second slower and Kevin would be dead.
Kevin had a family somewhere. Kevin had done nothing except take a delivery she’d handed him.
She wasn’t going to gamble somebody else’s life against her own pride.
Lily lowered her head and followed him.
His expression eased. When she came alongside him he said, almost approvingly, “If you were always this obedient, I’d like you a great deal more.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and went up.
Lily climbed after him.
The second floor was more normal than the first.
Normal only in that it had stopped being one bleached expanse and had been divided into rooms.
The normality was still drowned in white. Floor, walls, every door, the same white with nothing in it.
His hair was the only thing in the whole place that wasn’t.
He stopped at one of the doors and looked back. “This one.”
Quiet, and not open to discussion.
She went to it, took hold of the cold white handle, and pushed.
It wasn’t a bathroom — which was what she’d assumed, or briefly hoped.
It was a laboratory, filled with equipment she couldn’t name.
Ethan pulled a chair out from the bench and indicated it. “Sit.”
After what had happened downstairs, Lily didn’t argue.
She was inside now. If he intended something, there was nowhere in this house to run.
Better to see what he actually wanted.
He took a tray from a cabinet, set a few things on it, and sat down across from her.
“Give me your arm.”
She looked at the tray. Test tubes. Alcohol swabs. A disposable syringe still sealed.
The fear closed on her again.
“What are you doing?” Her voice tightened. “You’re not — you’re not injecting me with something.”
